


Fevers and Mirrors

by tend



Category: Mirrormask (2005)
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-21
Updated: 2009-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-04 21:19:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/34235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tend/pseuds/tend
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Keep an eye on the sky, Helena."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fevers and Mirrors

**Author's Note:**

  * For [OnceUponAFaun](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OnceUponAFaun/gifts).



> Thanks so much for giving me a chance to write about this fantastic movie! I can only hope it constitutes a satisfying, enjoyable present, despite its semi-ridiculous length. :)
> 
> Hearts and rainbow-crapping unicorns to Tyries and Tikia for the beta work, and please know that all remaining fubars (especially those of the stupid American variety) are entirely my fault. ~~All song and poem credits will be revealed after the reveal (just remember: if it's in italics, broken out from the standard formatting in some manner, or just sounds like it might actually have some depth, chances are good that I didn't write it).~~ Hey, look! Shiny credits at the bottom! We're rocking now.

_I.  
The lengthened shadow of a man  
Is history, said Emerson  
Who had not seen the silhouette  
Of Sweeney straddled in the sun._

_Tests the razor on his leg  
Waiting until the shriek subsides.  
The epileptic on the bed  
Curves backward, clutching at her sides._

_The ladies of the corridor  
Find themselves involved, disgraced,  
Call witness to their principles  
And deprecate the lack of taste._

~

_In Helena's dream, not much was happening. Things had angles, of course, and shape, and body and weight and texture, but little colour came through, and even less definition, like Polaroids she'd taken as a girl and left to weather atop her parent's caravan, through the rain and vicious chill of the sea they so often traveled beside. She felt empty and removed._

_Motion seeped through the lethargy, a slow tingling of awareness. Action and electricity, the press and pull of muscles. Something was approaching her, or she approaching it--difficult to tell, and more difficult still to open her mouth, wet her lips, lift her eyelids._

_"Sweet girl," said the something, and traced a fingertip along the curve of her eyebrow. The skin was soft, but cold, so cold that upon further reflection she couldn't decide if it was even skin, couldn't tell anything save that it was touching her; her face, her throat, and then, deliberate and delicate as a cat's paw, the underside of her left breast._

_She could feel every single beat of her heart against it._

_"He won't look out for you like I could."_

_The touch tightened, then slid up and over, toward her shoulder, where it settled and shook. A second voice said, "Keep an eye on the sky, Helena."_

"Look sharp, Helen."

"Nn," she said, waking. Her eyes were difficult to open, crusted shut after too much sleep, too little sleep, too erratic a schedule. "Unh. _Helena_. Bugger your nicknames, Valentine."

He began to laugh, withdrawing his hand. "That's a load of auld shite comin' from you. Unless you'd rather go back to wrestlin' with Damhán." One finger jabbed into her forehead, under her bangs. "C'mon, wiggle a toe. Your ma's got tea and toast in the tent."

"Don't tell me," Helena mumbled, drawing an arm over her face as she stretched, feeling warmth receding from her feet the second they emerged from the blanket. "The sun's not even up yet."

"Nah, it's up," Valentine corrected, grabbing onto her big toe as it appeared and using it to shake her whole foot. "Five minutes ago. Come on, now."

He needn't have added the last bit; she was up the second he touched her, jabbing ineffectually at his arms. "Stop it, stop, I'm awake! Agh, you _know_ I hate that."

"Aye," he agreed, grinning, and stood up, only to bend back over a second later to drop a kiss against her tousled bangs. "Tis very amusing."

Helena muttered something unattractive, rubbing both hands over her face. She hadn't quite got all the make up off before falling into bed last night, and knew there would be mascara on her fingers when she pulled them away. "I like calling you Valentine."

"As I enjoy bein' a Valentine," he replied agreeably, going to her trunk for her jacket, where she had left it draped after the evening's show, "and callin' you Helen when the fancy overtakes me."

"Why?" she asked, though she knew the answer. Parts of her fingers were grey when they at last swam into view, exactly as she'd envisioned.

Valentine, despite knowing just as well how many times she'd asked this question, obliged her once more, speaking as he approached with the bottle green slicker: "Because you're worth a war or two. Now hustle, or there'll be none left for ye."

She didn't hold onto the details of getting up, having had a week of mornings like this now, and plenty others besides from years past. The important thing was that she got her practice clothes on in good time, whereupon Valentine held the jacket up, letting her slip her arms in.

"I can't wait for summer," she muttered, not only because it would for the most part eschew her having to take this step before venturing outside, but because it would in this particular year signal the end of her touring for some time, Brighton uni having at last accepted her. It had taken a year and two separate applications to get up to snuff, but the strength of her work had carried her through, and her parents, if reluctant to let her go, were at least proud. And her father had his replacement juggler.

Valentine said nothing. Helena didn't have to ask why. She shrugged her shoulders a few times to settle the oilskin, listening to the hiss as it moved and keeping her eyes cast away from him.

"Come on, then," he said softly, hanging onto the tips of her fingers with one hand, and led the way into the rain.

Barefoot, they moved through the wet grass toward the tent.

~

Helena, for all her starry eyes when Valentine at last appeared in her reality, really hadn't meant to get involved with him.

Barring her parents, who were clearly an exception, she had always been rather leery of romance between troupe members, having seen the dissolution of a great many intrigues throughout her growing up, and experienced the effects of them, which had a nasty habit of rippling far out beyond the two (or three) originally involved. The worst had been between a fire breather and a set of twins who'd done a rather spectacular tightrope routine; not because of any particularly amazing injustices, but because they had let themselves get mad enough about the affair that the Campbells ended up losing all three at once. It had been a disaster, and responsible for a two-year gap in Helena's tightrope training that she was still making up for.

Even this, however, might not have impeded her in the case of Valentine, were it not for the twelve months she'd spent waiting for him, and the fact that in those months, she had at last convinced her father to let her go to an art college 'in a few years time'. Helena had known, then, that she'd be going away, and that in all probability, Valentine would be replacing her. She hadn't wanted it on her conscience, this abandonment.

That, and the fact that, for all the time she'd spent waiting, finally _meeting_ him had driven home the knowledge that he was not precisely the same person she'd known in the other world. It only made sense. She certainly hadn't been.

He was, of course, the same in _essence_, but in expression she simply couldn't reconcile the two. Valentine the Very Important Man had, in her recollection, an unchanging quality; Damhán Mac Carthaigh, who operated with almost childish delight under the ridiculous stage name of Valiant Valentine (she had really meant it as a joke, but he'd rather taken it to heart, and _quickly_), was like a river in her mind; generally encompassed by the same familiar banks, but ever offering further variety within these parametres, and ever revealing previously unimagined depths.

"Jaysus _fuck_, bloody fuckin' freezin' grass could take the boat offa dead man tryin' to catch a breath of air, I don't mind tellin' ye."

That and the swearing. Valentine the Very Important Man hadn't seemed to have anything in him but an occasional, disgruntled _bloody hell_. Her Valentine, while careful most of the time to keep his linguistic colours in check, had nevertheless grown up--as far as she'd been able to gather--in the very definition of a working class family, and sometimes made this known more volubly than she would have imagined. It certainly wasn't anything she hadn't heard from the roustabouts, two of whom were likewise Dubliners, but it was one of the many clear illustrations of the differences between the two.

"Lovely, Valentine," she muttered, trying to ward off a smile. It would encourage him. "Makes you wish we still had our Wellies, eh?"

"That," he replied regally, head held high, "was an accident, as you well know."

Helena would have pursued that just as far as it deserved, but they had reached the tent flap, where Valentine paused chivalrously to hold the canvas aside for her. She took a jab at his stomach as she passed, which he dodged, chuckling, and followed her inside.

It wasn't much warmer, but her mother was at the donated ringmaster's podium with the mugs and the battered steel air pot, and the smell of toast was pleasant mingled with the wet grass, the powdery itch of chalk. Dragging her feet along the ground to dry them, Helena made her way over, nodding her good mornings to the Germans as she passed and muttering as she went, "Remind me why we're rehearsing a new show while we're right in the middle of performing another?"

"Because," Valentine murmured back, walking behind her, "your ma's the brains, and what the brain says, the body does."

"I expect it's just meant to torture me for leaving."

"That's right, love," he said amiably, resting a few curled fingers briefly in the small of her back, "and through your pretty self, us."

"Helena," said Joanne, seeing her and smiling. Helena smiled back, setting aside her irritation as they kissed. It had been two years already since the operation, but she still did her best not to stay upset for long without a really good reason. "Get some tea, love. You'll have a few minutes to yourself this morning before you're needed. Have to start with Fred this time."

"Where's dad?" Helena turned to collect a mug, only to find that Valentine had already filled two, and was holding one out for her to take. "Thanks, love."

"Certainly," he said, watching her mother. Helena rolled her eyes, unable to stop herself. She had no idea why he was still trying so hard to make a good impression; both her parents adored him.

"I expect still trying to find the gorilla suit," Joanne mumbled in response to her question, flashing a patient grin at Valentine. "You know how proud he is of that manky old thing."

"It's a bloody hazard anymore," Helena mumbled back. "Fifty p says the tutu's come loose again and he's trying to sew it back on."

"Missus Campbell?" Fred was hovering behind Valentine, raising a hand to get Joanne's attention. "'M ready for ye now, mam."

"Right," said her mother, and stepped up onto the podium, mug in hand. "Alright, everybody."

The small group quieted, giving her their attention.

"I know a week of this's got all of us a bit mutinous, but this ought to be the last day. Consider it an incentive to give your best attention; the faster we can get the final structure down, the faster we can all take our individual bits away and work on them alone. We'll just wait a few more minutes for Morris to find his way back, and then we'll get started. Fred, you're with me 'til then. Everybody ready?"

The response was a mixed bag of various affirmatives, from Helena's _yes_ to the Germans' purposefully militant _jawohl_ to Valentine's attempt at a broad Scots _och, aye_, which fell somewhat flat, but nevertheless got a few of them giggling.

Her father appeared seven minutes later, tutu in hand, and interrupted to wonder if anyone could be bothered to spare a moment for a spot of sewing.

"Just leave it off, Mr. Campbell," said the Magician from the left stadium. "Tis funnier when it falls halfway through the act."

~

The new show, of course, was as ever more a sleight-of-hand juggling of their old routines, rearranged and given a slightly different look, than something truly novel. They all changed their masks around, repainted or reworked parts of their costumes if they could afford it, added in the new acts and pruned out the holes from the ones they'd lost on the road. The perpetual need of the Campbell Family Circus for another clown was becoming something of a legend.

The primary difference this time was the new safety net, which at last fit perfectly into the ring. They'd had a safety net before, of course, but it had always been a bit big, and when they'd lost their main tightrope sequence seven years ago, Morris had more or less retired it from the show proper. Having recently picked up a new tightrope artist, however, who had brought the new net with her, he'd at last seen reason to add a short routine back in.

All of which wouldn't have meant too awfully much to Helena if it hadn't also meant a new clown routine, one which had been given--much to her delight--to Valentine and herself. She suspected that it was _only_ to her delight, given what it entailed, but they had until January to work that out.

Remarkably, it was nearly a two-minute piece; substantial for a gag in their caliber of show. It began with the two clowns walking out on the tightrope, making a great show of having no balance whatsoever. Upon reaching the centre both would turn to face one another, do a bit of juggling, drop all their pins on accident, and be at a brief (and hopefully hysterical) loss as to how to finish. Here they would begin a small demonstration of impromptu, trembling synchronicity, moving back and forth on the rope, almost falling in exactly the same ways.

The tricky part came after this, one clown taking a fake fall that would leave him hanging by his knees from the line, whereupon the second clown would do a flip from the rope, only to be caught by the first on the way down, showing a brief glimmer of skill intended to impress. This was more or less the end, the bit concluding with both clowns climbing back up, taking shaky bows, astonished by their own skill, only to finally fall in unison, whereupon the real artist would come out, giving them time to clamber unnoticed out of the net.

Helena, while a better juggler than tightrope walker, had nevertheless been practicing since she was a girl, and was comfortable with all the tricks the routine called for. Valentine had never stepped foot on one in his life.

Needless to say, he got the catching part, while Helena volunteered to fly. Even if he missed, there was the net, and she had always secretly wished they'd been able to afford a trapeze. This was the closest she'd ever come to imitating a real flyer.

Given the rapid nature of these morning rehearsals, they had yet to begin practicing the bit in full. What was obviously most important to work on was Valentine's balance, and getting comfortable with falling; thus they been giving most of their time to just walking back and forth, plus a few minutes' practice dropping backwards into the net, learning how to do it right.

"Introducing from the lost annals of Ancient Roman glory," announced her father in his ringmaster voice, gesticulating dramatically from the ground to tease a laugh from her as they began their piece of the rehearsal, "_Lucky Fortuna and her Valiant Valentine!_"

"He should be sayin' Scared Shiteless Valentine," muttered Valentine at her back, sourly. This was only their third day of this kind of practice, and he was still having the inevitable falling dreams, much to his displeasure. "Three-Footed, No-Toed Valentine, Soon-to-Be-Dead Valentine--"

"Hush, you," she interrupted, and flourishing her arms, led the way.

~

"So," said her mother, cracking an egg into the bread on the skillet with practiced ease. "Why don't you want Damh to go to Brighton with you?"

"_Mum_," Helena groaned, collapsing onto the padded bench beside the table in her parents' caravan. It was twenty to noon a week after their return to a normal schedule, and two hours 'til she had agreed to meet Valentine for practice. They'd gotten all the way to walking in unison now, and tomorrow would be his first try at catching her. "That's not it. You _know_ that's not it. Dad needs another juggler, and once I'm gone, Valentine's it."

Joanne shook her head with a quick grin, cracking a second egg into a second basket. "'Valentine'," she murmured wonderingly. "He really doesn't mind you calling him that?"

"Mum," Helena said pointedly.

Sprinkling salt and pepper across the eggs in their nests, Joanne just as pointedly didn't look back at her, focusing on her cooking. "I don't believe you, you know. He can't have said _nothing_ about going with, not as absolutely mad as he is about you."

Embarrassed, Helena threw her hands in the air, pretending she wasn't blushing. "Fine, _don't_ believe me! He's still staying here."

Her mother shook her head again, but refrained from pursuing the topic further. Instead she said, neutrally, "You'll be lonely, all by yourself in the city. You can't say it isn't true."

"I'll get a dog or something," Helena murmured dismissively, fiddling with the sugar bowl. "Don't suggest aunt Nan again, please. I feel guilty enough saying no, but you _know_ how mad I'll go alone with her. Besides, how do you figure I'll get lonely in a boarding house? There'll be loads of other girls."

Joanne, however, had apparently said her piece, flipping the eggs in silence. A moment passed in desperate want of conversation, until finally Helena scoffed lightly, standing to fetch plates and forks. "Fine. We can both just sit here thinking we're right, then."

"We certainly have a lot of practice at it," said her mother archly, and held the pan out from the stove. "Pick one."

~

"But I _could_ go with you," Valentine pointed out, pulling the nightshirt quickly over his head.

Helena almost asked how much time he'd spent with her mother this evening, but stopped herself at the last second, fully aware that that wasn't the reason. He just wanted to go. "I know you could," she replied, trying for patience, and more or less achieving it. "But that's not really the point, is it? It's only two years, and I'll be back summers, not to mention the two months of overlap we'll have between my school and your tour break."

He'd settled on her bed by this point, watching while she readied her things for the Saturday matinee. "True," he agreed, "and then again, it's still fourteen months. _Fourteen months_ without me smilin' face. Think on it."

"And ten months with practically no change from things as they are now, Valentine," she reminded him, but began smiling in spite of herself at his forlorn expression. "Love, what would you even _do_ in Brighton? Take a shot at being a waiter for real? You said yourself you came with when we left Scotland because you couldn't bear to see us go."

"It wasn't just the show I was comin' after," he said quietly, for once completely still as he watched her.

This was one of the other things that would forever separate her Valentine from the Very Important Man; the appetent nature of his visible eyes, and the difference they made to his every expression. The way they could bring her up short, and breathless.

But Helena didn't have anything to say here, much as she would have liked to.

After a long moment of silence Valentine at last sighed, laying back and scooting over to make room. "Well, come on. Best get some sleep."

Feeling oddly guilty, Helena turned off the light. In the dark she could see only the outline of his shoulder against the camper window; just a silhouette, and still somehow dejected in affect.

And he claimed he never sulked.

~

_Helena dreamed again, the same dream as before. This was odd to her, as she never, never repeated dreams, or hadn't as far as she could recall, and this range of elements, these leeched colours--none of it made sense._

_"Sweet girl."_

_It was the same voice; familiar, disturbingly so, and focused entirely upon her. She tried to open her mouth, but it filled just as quickly with air, and wouldn't move after in the ways she told it._

_The voice bore down upon her, molded itself to her body. It was strangely, appallingly intimate. She began to squirm, discomfited, silent jaw working without success._

_"He's going to drop you."_

_Then the second voice, again familiar, again illusive, carrying the same recommendation: "Keep an eye on the sky, Helena."_

_She opened her eyes, and above her on the ceiling was a mirror._

Helena woke with a soft gasp, her whole body tingling. The table clock read half past two when she glanced over, and revealed no other helpful information beyond this. Valentine's breathing was deep and regular at her back.

She hadn't until this moment consciously recalled the dream from last week, perhaps because she'd been woken so suddenly then. Perhaps it simply hadn't been memorable prior to repetition. Either way, it stayed in her mind now, sitting queasily, like an accidental gulp of sour milk.

It took a long time for her to fall asleep again.

~

Before their inevitable collision, right after Valentine had first passed his audition and proved himself mad enough to qualify, he'd lived with the two Dubliner roustabouts in their camper, and Helena in her parents', having left her little one back in Brighton.

He stumbled across them the year after her mother's operation, during their January-February tour of Scotland. Helena still had no idea how exactly he'd ended up there, but knew someday he would tell her, just as he would someday explain why he disdained jam on toast, yet took sugar in his tea.

The fact that he liked her was immediately apparent. It had been strange at first, considering the degree of indifference his counterpart had expressed in a similar situation.

It had also been more than a little awkward, not only because of her initial disdain for fiddling about with fellow performers, but because he _was_ so different from the Valentine she'd been expecting. He was equally sarcastic and sharp, but not with her--not like the other had been. He was careful of her feelings, if not always successful with that care, and for the first week or so he actually _followed_ her, discreetly, taking note of her routines, until he was able to begin magically appearing in many of her haunts ahead of her, creating opportunities for conversation.

To be fair, he hadn't had much to do at first; before her father could properly incorporate him into some of the more involved routines, there had been nothing he really _could_ do but the small, extra work, handing out props during the evening shows and memorising the acts as they went. It wasn't until they broke down for their return to England that he got his proper induction, silly hat, mask, and juggling pins included.

Helena had to admit, he really was more of a hat person.

It was at the end of the first month that he finally noticed her dogged, if bizarrely apologetic reticence, which even she could hardly explain any longer. For all his dissimilarities, she had begun to understand by that point that they were going to be what ultimately made him someone she could stand to be around for more than a day without wanting to strangle. It was just that she'd gotten so used to subtly turning him away that it had come to feel almost like an obligation, like something she couldn't stop doing without a proper excuse. Then she got it into her head that if he was really that interested, he would make a move, regardless of her attitude, and for a while that was that.

For some time he backed off, following her less, immersing himself in the work of the show. Then began the third, penultimately awkward month, wherein they both forgot simultaneously how to have a sensible conversation with one another, and spent all their time blushing instead, save for when they performed. Strangely, neither of them was anything but eager then; Helena supposed because the circus was, as her father had always been so fond of saying, firmly in their blood, and the show always went on.

It wasn't until August of that year that things had finally come to a head. They'd arrived precisely on schedule in London at the start of the month, begun their season of shows with a flourish, and got precisely halfway through when a surprisingly violent summer storm forced them to cancel one evening in a hurry.

Laid up with nothing to do, the roustabouts, the tumblers, half the musicians, and the Magician all did what any sensible men with a free night would do, and set out for the nearest pub, leaving the campsite feeling battered, wet, and empty. None of which would have been worth half a straw to her had her mother not dropped a dish into her hands at half past nine and said, "Be a dear and run that over to Damhán, Helena."

"He's at the pub, mum," Helena replied, trying to hand it back.

"Then I suppose that's his double sitting out there in the rain like a hole in a soggy log."

Startled, Helena went over to the window, where she found her mother to be absolutely right; Valentine _was_ sitting out in the rain, and to all appearances juggling while he was at it.

"What a pillock," she said wonderingly, and got her slicker on without another word, completely failing to notice how thoroughly she'd been set up. She learned later that they'd all had some bet or another running on them, and that the Magician, predictably, came out at the top of the pool.

"What on earth's the matter with you?" she demanded as she overtook him, listening with half an ear to the pleasant sound of the rain as it pattered off the aluminium covering the dish in her hands. "You'll catch your death without any shred of dignity left for the funeral."

"Ye can't say it's not a _bit_ romantic," he weedled, to all appearances completely unconcerned with his soaked state. "If I drown, t'will be by an act of nature, and if I should pass of pneumonia, I'll have died for me art."

"You'll have died for stupidity more like," she said sharply, and snagged one of his pins from the air. "Come on, inside."

He went, smiling, and sat down at the table without a care for the water he carried in, which at once began the process of soaking straight through the bench cushion.

The dish turned out to hold a cobbler, still warm, which she delivered to him with as nonchalant a shrug as she could manage, her nerves having abruptly returned. She'd been feeling stranger and stranger around him for the last week, like a string drawn too tight around a finger. "Mum wanted you to have it."

"Fantastic," he enthused, delighted, and set it on the table with a hearty thump. "Care for a bite before you sally forth once more?"

Helena opened her mouth to say no, she really wouldn't, and heard, "Sure, why not?" come out instead, as though someone else altogether had spoken.

His face, however, was worth the slip, as it broke into the most enormous, hopeful grin she had yet seen. "Really?" he said.

Helena could neither stifle a laugh, nor keep herself from grinning back. "Yeah, course. I'll even play some cards if you like."

So they had some cobbler, and played a few hands of gin while they were at it, and talked with increasing comfort as the time passed.

She wasn't quite sure how they reached the topic, but eventually his parentage came up. She suspected it happened because she asked about his name, though he later proved to be just as useless at remembering as her.

The surprising moment came when he, after briefly describing his mother, added, almost like an afterthought, "Course, I never did have a da around, seein' as I was adopted. Me ma never actually married, the auld harpy."

"Oh," said Helena, uncertain of how exactly to respond to this. "D'you--remember your real parents at all, then?"

He shook his head, laying down the three of spades. "Nah. They certainly did look out for me, though. Got a nice stretch o' field through their will, big as anything--good for lumpers, I expect, and probably a house beside."

She grinned, imagining a scraggly handful of metres in the shadow of a hill somewhere. "Sounds like it's really something."

He grinned brightly, ignoring her sarcasm. "It certainly is. After all, I'm a very important man. I've got land."

Helena felt the expression wiped clean off her face.

A second later she set her cards down, purposefully, eyes never leaving his.

Valentine for his part only blinked, obviously trying to work out what he'd said. "Er. Does that mean you're at gin, then?"

The next thing Helena knew, she had stood and gone to his side of the table, where she promptly set about kissing him, unable and utterly unwilling to stop herself now that she'd finally come to it.

After a moment he yanked her back by her elbows, gaping. "Jaysus sufferin' Christ," he gasped. "I thought ye didn't like me!"

"Well, clearly you were wrong," she said impatiently. "Why are we stopping?"

Valentine considered the question a few seconds, then shook his head, eyes enormous and excited. "No bloody clue," he replied, and pulled her back down.

A few hours later they still had the camper to themselves, much to Helena's relief, particularly when he started getting a bit soppy in his expressions of admiration for her fair self.

Another hour, and they had the good sense to dress again before going to rest on his cot, still talking softly about whatever came into their minds.

"It means fawn," he murmured at one point into her neck, running one hand slowly through her hair over and over. His own hair had long ago dried. "Me name, I mean. Tis why I never talk of it, bloody ridiculous thing."

"I think it's brilliant," she murmured back, and meant it. It wasn't very fitting, but it could be improved. "All you have to do is say it's _faun_, like a satyr. You could grow a little beard and take up the pan pipe and everything."

"Darlin' girl," he whispered, pressing a kiss to the bottom of her chin, "for you I shall do anythin'."

~

_II.  
And into the sea goes pretty England and me,  
Round the Bay of Biscay and back for tea.  
Hit traffic on the dogger bank,  
Up the Thames to find a taxi rank,  
Sail on by with the tide and go to sleep,  
And the radio says:  
This is a low,  
But it won't hurt you.  
When you're alone  
It will be there with you,  
Finding ways to stay solo._

~

Helena hadn't yet told Valentine exactly how hard the catch they were working on for the clown bit was. It motivated him more to think that he was doing poorly at something simple.

The issue, practically speaking, was simply one of direction, with her falling straight down instead of flying toward him. She had to be very careful as she dropped not to come all the way out of her flip, to fall stomach-first toward the net instead of feet, and to begin swinging her weight toward him as soon as their hands connected, just as it was imperative that he work to help her swing the second they came into contact. The result was a beautiful full-body arc that would, were he to only redirect her weight instead of trying to slow her as well, carry them both in a full rotation around the wire. Someday she hoped to work that into the routine, but not until he was more comfortable, and certainly not until she'd got back.

For all its difficulty, however, they had nonetheless begun practicing it by the end of October, and had gotten noticeably better by the start of the second week. It was a particularly remarkable improvement for him, given that he'd wanted to cut the move altogether when they at last came to it.

"_Why?_" she'd demanded, frustrated, after nearly ten minutes spent arguing about it.

"Because I'm afraid I'll drop you!" he'd admitted loudly, unhappy.

She had been quick to assure him that he probably would, but not to worry because that was what the net was _there_ for; but his concern had been touching, and for a moment brought her up short.

Soon enough, however, he got used to it, and even began to show some enjoyment for the challenge of the work. She most certainly enjoyed herself, loved the feeling of falling, and the moment in which he first broke her inertia, the way they moved in time through the air.

"Darlin' Helen," he sighed gently one evening, after their third successful execution of the catch in a row, "you're graceful as a bird, and at least twice's pretty."

"'M bloody tired of this leotard is what I am," she laughed back, pulling a face as she swung, gently now, from his gripping hands. "Let's stop a minute, shall we? I could murder some tea."

It was too difficult to tell him that he looked equally graceful, no matter how badly she wanted to.

That same day saw her second argument with her mother regarding Valentine's place in her life, and culminated in her taking the lorry out into the city in her break between rehearsal and the evening show, roaring into the car park of an unsuspecting little pet shop, and stomping in to find a dog.

She didn't much want a dog, but cats had been right out ever since her last run in with the sphinxes, and it was the only other thing she could think of that would work at all.

This, of course, was before she saw the snake.

It was, as the card on its terrarium obligingly revealed, a ball python, only a few years old, and a soothing mottled brown and black, with white lines working the pattern into a gentle, undulating set of curves. The really fantastic things, however, were her eyes, which stared up at Helena with an infinite, soft blackness, and the flat, sharp intensity of a gaze that was at once endless and oddly familiar.

"This," she heard herself say after a moment, despite the fact that it wasn't at all what she'd arrived meaning to get, and that she hadn't the first clue how to care for it.

All she knew, in fact, was that she was going to call her Valencia, and that she was easily going to be a thousand times more interesting than any silly old dog.

~

When Valentine tried to come into her camper a half hour after her return, only to nearly kill himself tripping over the folding chair she'd shoved beside the door, Helena finally took a moment to wonder if perhaps she ought to have thought this whole pet thing out a little more beforehand, namely with an eye toward making certain she had enough room.

"Jaysus, girl," he protested, picking himself up indelicately. "What're you doin'?"

"Making room for Valencia." She offered the explanation peremptorily on purpose, hoping to keep herself from grinning as she gave one final push to the little card table from the Fins, enough to send it skittering flush against the wall. She'd already got the little glass terrarium set up on top and sparsely decorated, but no light installed. "Hand me that bulb, would you?"

"Bulb?" he repeated, perplexed, and looked around until he at last spotted it atop her wardrobe. This was followed immediately by a short, unconvincing cough, clearly a bid for her attention, but after only a second of waiting he fetched it anyway. "Ah. Forgive me if this is bein' just a bit slow, but who would 'Valencia' be?"

"My snake." Helena plucked out the fake log in the terrarium as she said it, revealing the little ball python. Valencia wasn't particularly happy to be exposed, but she didn't strike, and even allowed Helena to pick her up and drape her illustratively across her shoulders. "See, mum thought maybe I should have something to keep me company when I go--"

She would have finished explaining in good time, and perhaps even figured out something to say to cap it off that managed to keep him from feeling as though he was being replaced, but Valentine's focus was elsewhere; namely on scaring the bloody hell out of her by jumping backwards so suddenly that his shins hit the bed frame with a bang. She half expected him to fall, but instead, paradoxically, he not only regained his balance, but danced right back toward her again, only to stop and hover a foot or so away.

"_Mary_," was the first understandable thing to finally leave his mouth. "Ye--ye great daft girl, get that thing from round your neck!"

Stunned, she could only for a moment manage to laugh, equal parts amusement and perplexity. "Valentine. It's only a snake."

"Right, a _snake!_" He began to flutter both raised hands erratically, giving visual expression to his anxiety. "Only a _snake_, only goin' to choke the bloody life out of you soon's it gets hungry enough, Helena--Helen, sweet girl, take it off."

"No," she said, quietly.

They stared at one another for a moment in utter silence.

Something occurred to her. "You aren't--_afraid_ of snakes, are you, Valentine?"

"Course not!" he barked, only to have the lie completely ruined by the blush which promptly suffused his face from ears to nose.

Helena felt herself beginning to grin, breaking the tension. "The great Valentine, afraid of some titchy python? Never saw _that_ coming."

"Because it isn't true!" He began to take another, shorter step back, then caught himself and straightened, pressing his hands together before his body and pointing all his fingertips in her direction for emphasis: "Tis not a fear of snakes much as a dislike for scales. But, as we're all perfectly aware, Valentine's aren't afraid of anythin'."

"Excellent," she enthused mischievously, and draped Valencia across his wrists with rapid ceremony. "Keep an eye on her while I get this bulb in, then. She's a bit cold, don't you think?"

"Uh," he said, frozen, and to all appearances too terrified to speak. Even his arms remained frozen in midair. Helena almost burst out laughing, but brought herself up short before it could happen, some small, slightly more sensible part of her mind recognizing that that might have been a bit far out of line. She was quick with the light, and retrieved the snake from his immobile form in less than a minute, returning her to her log and sliding the terrarium top in place.

"There," she said, turning toward him, hands crossed behind her back. "All done."

Another moment of silence followed this, broken only by the honking of one of the clown's horns outside, travelling in a faint Doppler line under her window.

"I just want ye to know," he said at last, eyes fixed in complete petrifaction to the far wall, "that that was a fuckin' uncomfortable thing, and ye shall be makin' it up to me."

~

She did, and quickly; barely six hours later, after the night's show, and her first experience with snake feeding. It wasn't as uncomfortable as she had supposed it would be to hold the thawed small mouse out to Valencia, simply because she snapped it out of the tweezers so fast that Helena hardly had time to think about what she was doing. She got her shower for the evening feeling peculiarly peaceful, and slid into bed next to Valentine warm and damp, where he promptly engulfed her rolling over.

"You're much too tall, you know," she pointed out sensibly, squirming a little.

Valentine ignored this wisdom, saying instead with great precision, "_You_," and managing in that single word an almost perfect impression of her voice without throwing his in the slightest. "_You_ are a bloody evil wan, d'ye know that?"

"I wouldn't've done it if you hadn't fibbed." Grinning unabashedly, she at last managed to get enough of his weight off to roll onto her side, staring more comfortably into his face. "If you'd just said, Oh, Helena, love, Valentine's aren't ever afraid of _anything_ except nasty snakes that aren't even full-grown, _then_ I would've been perfectly sweet. Honest."

Valentine began to protest this, brow furrowed, only to stop with his mouth open, staring in a semblance of horror. "It isn't full grown?"

"Not even half," Helena smiled, and began to rub one of her feet up and down the back of his leg teasingly. "She's going to be a right big monster by the time she's done."

"Really?"

Helena almost couldn't keep a straight face, slowing the motions of her foot to a more sensual rhythm. "Really," she assured seriously. "Dozens and dozens of feet. Whole kilometres. I'm going to have to feed her lions by the time she's done."

At this point Valentine finally got it, and without a word began to tickle her, using the leg she'd been rubbing to pin her foot to the mattress.

For some minutes they wrestled companionably, mostly for the sake of touching one another alone, away from the eyes of an ever-changing audience, until she at last ended up crouching atop him, slender fingers curved around his bony shoulders. Then they spent another few minutes kissing, because they _were_ before all other things show people, and possessed of naturally perfect timing. The hand that moved up to slide gently down her back was neither sudden nor unwelcome, and Helena arched carefully against it, breaking her mouth away to press to his jaw, rough with evening stubble.

Valentine by way of response nuzzled gently at her hair, her cheek. A moment later he urged her up, until he could reach one bare breast with his mouth, and begin to kiss gently at the delicate skin. His free hand he engaged in the task of caressing what his lips couldn't reach, tracing the curve of it slowly, reverent, while she closed her eyes, feeling each breath she took in all the corners of her body, deep and precise.

"I do adore the smell of ye," he murmured, speaking into her skin with a surprising calm, and licked up into the hollow of her throat, hands slipping down to her hips, progressing toward synchronicity.

She wriggled back down until she was again straddling his hips, grinning. "'S better than thinking I stink," she offered, and waited 'til he started to laugh to slip the last little bit down, just to hear the way his breath caught and broke into a gasp.

They didn't speak much after that. Not until they were dry again, and holding one another against the chill, when Valentine hitched the thin quilt up a bit more snugly and reflected, "I'm not goin' to get a say about this little monster, am I?"

"That's right," she murmured, and smiling, dropped a kiss onto his chest. "Pretend it's my birthday present."

"Your birthday's months off," he grumbled, with only the slightest hint of alarm at the thought that he might be misremembering this fact showing through.

Helena smiled more broadly still, brushed another kiss against his skin, then closed her mouth and her eyes and thought determinedly of sleep, and dreaming pleasantly, until it more or less happened.

~

_Or less._

_She was asleep, but the dreams, of course, these damn dreams without logic, these dreams where she couldn't see, could only feel at most a hand against her, where the colour was gone, and where--_

_"Sweet girl."_

_\--there was the voice, that **voice**. She didn't understand. "I don't understand," she said, at last able to move her mouth, if in fact it was her mouth moving._

_"He won't look--"_

_"Stop saying that. Who are you?"_

_Silence. Then, from the touch and from the voice:_

_"Two sisters are we, one dark and one fair,  
In two towers dwelling, we make quite the pair.  
One from the land and one from the sea--  
Tell us truly, who are we?"_

_"What?" Helena whispered, writhing in frustration. She could feel pressure beneath her eyes, like a migraine, or a coming storm._

_Then the second voice yet again, achingly familiar: "Keep an eye on the sky, Helena."_

_And there once more was the mirror._

_Then the mirror was on the ground, no longer a simple piece of glass, but an enormous, full-length thing, monstrous and consuming, and she was pressed flush against in, tingling all over as she stared into and through her face, her face that wasn't her face, her face that--_

She woke up.

The frustration was for a minute so overwhelming that she had to climb out of bed to pace, walking the narrow aisle of empty floor back and forth, back and forth, shivering and naked and angry.

She didn't understand why this was happening, even less in her sleep-addled state, which was currently insisting that this was how everything had started, this kind of dreaming that couldn't be dreaming, and she--she had _won_, hadn't she? The other her, the her who wasn't her, who was her, had gone back, she wasn't a part of her life anymore. Right? This couldn't possibly be happening again. There was no other world left to bleed over into hers.

"Helen?"

Helena stopped pacing, framing her forehead with her hands and taking a deep, steadying breath. "Sorry. I woke you?"

"Nah," he said, half asleep. "Maybe. Don't much matter. C'mon, it's freezin', and you're bare as the day you were born." He was holding up the quilt for her, waiting.

"Thanks." She slipped back under feeling oddly apprehensive, despite his presence. She didn't want to think because of it.

_Why does she keep saying he won't look out for me?_

~

Valencia had her first shedding just a few weeks after this, which happened not in a neat, clean piece like she'd been expecting, but shabbily, small sloughings that concerned her deeply, particularly when one bit toward the back of her head failed to come off.

Finally Helena resorted to picking it away, only to find, to her astonishment, that doing so caused the skin under to bleed. With only three hours 'til the evening show and no time to find a vet she'd never before needed, Helena, panicked, bundled Valencia back into her carrier, and set out to find the snake charmer.

She had been with them only two months now, and Helena, for all her fascination with the routine she performed (definitely one of their best), hadn't yet had much of a chance to talk with her. Standing outside the caravan she shared with the Finnish tumblers, however, Helena couldn't shake the feeling that she was in exactly the right spot, despite her anxiety.

The charmer opened the door rather quickly, only to stare down at her in silence for several seconds, either trying to figure out what she could want, or just trying to place who she was. "Oh," she said finally, blinking. "You're--Helena, right?"

Out of make up, her beauty was surprisingly refined, provided one ignored the scales tattooed across the majority of her face and neck. Her hair was dark and thick and perfectly wavy, like a movie star's.

"Right," Helena said, wondering distantly if she was really that forgettable, or rather if she'd just been too busy with her portfolio and Valentine to make herself visible. "And you're Dinah."

Dinah nodded in a single deliberate motion, then smiled, so abruptly and broadly that Helena was for a second completely taken aback. Her smile was considerably less classical than her beauty, though no less stunning. "Shame we haven't talked much. What can I do for you, dear?"

Helena took a moment here to explain her situation, holding up the carrier illustratively. She hadn't even got halfway through, however, before Dinah stopped and ushered her in, insisting on having a look while she finished. Helena acquiesced (amazed to discover in the exchange that Dinah was not only gorgeous, but possessed of an incredible sibilant lisp that hovered tantalizingly between a soft _th_ and a hiss), and by the time she'd laid everything out, found with some amazement that Valencia had curled herself in a neat corkscrew around the woman's slender arm, tongue flickering lazily in and out.

"Well, you've not much to worry about, Helena," Dinah murmured at last, using--now that Helena was paying enough attention to notice--the universal vocabulary of a lisper, _correct_ instead of _yes_ and _pardon me_ rather than _sorry_. "It isn't really your fault. Mo_s_t likely the one who had her before you mi_ss_ed that bit for a few sheds, and it remelded to her, meaning you picked off a bit of living _s_kin with the dead. Should it go poorly again, ju_s_t brush a little water over the dry patch for a day or two, and it ought to come off without trouble. How long have you had her?"

"Just a few weeks," Helena replied, legs going a bit soft with relief. "Thank you _so_ much. What should I do about the bit I messed up, though?"

"Keep it clean." Dinah pulled Valencia from her arm, moving her lower to wrap around her waist. "Not much beyond that, though. There'll be a mark for a while, but you have a good chan_c_e of it coming off in the next few sheds. Good thing to remember, though; you can wrap her round your tummy in the winter, like I'm doing now, to keep her warm, and lay off your battery. And you're more than welcome to pop by for help whenever you want in the future."

"Great," Helena breathed, trying not to let her alarm at the thought that she might have scarred her for life show through. "I should, er, go now, then. Got to get things together for tonight."

"Right," said Dinah, still smiling, and returned Valencia. "She'_s_ a beautiful girl. Should you ever find her too much of a handful, I'd be happy to have her."

Startled, Helena blinked openly at her for several seconds, but found nothing save calm sincerity in the charmer's meticulously patterned face.

"Thanks," she said slowly, and unexpectedly found herself smiling, though she couldn't really be sure why. "I'll remember that."

~

Things went generally very well after that, with the exception of Valentine, who simply couldn't overcome his discomfort around her new pet. Things came to a head near Christmastime, when one evening, in a fit of romance, he reached amorously up under the hem of her shirt, and encountered not the waist he'd been expecting, but one of Valencia's small coils.

Helena had only been following the charmer's advice, but he took it all around rather badly, and the ensuing fight was nasty enough that she ended it by dragging herself, python and all, over to Dinah's caravan. A single look at her expression was enough to convince the woman that some temporary lodgings for the python were well in order, whereupon Helena, in need of a good cry, removed herself to her parents' caravan to spend the night, hating all of them a little simply for breathing, and daring in their breathing to be less put upon than her.

The problem was not so much that Valentine couldn't get beyond a fear he was perfectly entitled to have, as it was that this conflict had become figurehead to all the other problems they suddenly seemed to have. Intellectually she knew that they'd always argued, but as the days crept closer and closer to her inevitable departure, this arguing had stopped feeling like a natural part of a cycle, and more like a thing they were using to vent completely unrelated frustrations they didn't feel brave enough to talk about.

The crux of the biscuit, of course, was their ongoing disagreement about his going with her to Brighton; but inside this conflict was a second, internal problem that Helena couldn't possibly reveal to him, mostly because it made no rational sense.

She was scared, as ridiculous as it sounded, of how rapidly things were moving between them; barely a year and a half gone by, and she had already begun to catch herself imagining what it would be like to stay with him forever. Her parents had gotten married in their early twenties, where Valentine already was, and which she was rapidly approaching. She knew it was a childish impulse, but there was something deep inside her that resented the notion that she was turning out exactly like her mother, making all the same decisions.

It was really a doubly contemptible thing, as, examined critically, what she was really doing was passing up a life of potential satisfaction and connection in favor of proving her separateness from a parent she loved dearly. Understanding this inconsistency, however, only frustrated her more.

And under all this lay, if she really considered it, a second fear that she was considerably more loathe to think of. A fear of committing herself to him completely, only to discover years down the line that she had made a mistake, letting her fondness for another version of him impede her perception of his character in reality. Or, barring this, that he would abandon her, either by choice or accident, as her mother almost had.

The dreams didn't help much, either.

She kept having them, more and more frequently as January approached. It didn't take long, for all she knew the voice was wrong, for the doubt slip through all of her mind, taking root. She tried not to give it any credence, but with the question presenting itself so frequently, this became increasingly difficult.

Interestingly, January was also the month in which the poetry began to appear graffiti'd on their campers and caravans, a stanza or two per side. It began with theirs, and would have been considerably more irritating if the work hadn't been so damn fascinating.

Valentine was the one who first found it, and who brought her outside to read, painted in a large, loopy hand:

_Gloomy Orion and the Dog  
Are veiled; and hushed the shrunken seas;  
The person in the Spanish cape  
Tries to sit on Sweeney's knees_

_Slips and pulls the table cloth  
Overturns a coffee-cup,  
Reorganized upon the floor  
She yawns and draws a stocking up;_

"What on earth is _that_ supposed to be?" Helena wondered, utterly perplexed, and trying to keep from shivering in the cold.

"_Sweeney Among the Nightingales_," said the Magician, who happened to be passing behind them at the moment, spinning his ever-present glass globes with one hand and devouring an apple with the other. Helena wondered fleetingly how it was he opened doors. "Quite a famous piece, really. Funny to see that bit, though. Tis straight from the middle."

Helena shared a curious look with Valentine while the Magician wandered unceremoniously away, trying not to frown.

"We'll have to tell your da, of course," he pointed out at last, tousling a hand distractedly through his hair.

"Course," she sighed, beginning to shiver at last.

Valentine noticed, and before she could protest, shucked off his coat, dropping it neatly around her shoulders. "There ye go," he murmured, and after a breath's hesitation, took her hand with a faint smile.

She smiled back, touched beyond the months of tension. "Thanks, love."

~

They were, of course, simply feeling the stress of any relationship about to hit its first big hurdle. Helena knew this, in part because her mother repeated it every time she came over for the night to escape him (which didn't happen very often, but just enough to make her sick of having the same two conversations with her parents).

"Don't borrow trouble," she was particularly fond of saying. "Before you know it you'll have created more problems than you ever would have had if you'd just let things be."

Tormented with advice like this, Helena found herself wishing that they'd _all_ leave her alone, that they would just let her have some time to herself without anybody pushing or asking or intruding, some space to sort it all out.

The more she thought about it, the more she realized that she'd _never_ really been alone in her life. Wherever she'd gone, someone had always been watching, whether she was on the stage or off; and it was this, she supposed, that she was feeling the effects of. Her camper had been the first place that was wholly hers, wholly private, but even that had been shared out now.

The end of January finally arrived, the last week before they changed over to the new show. As usual, they took this time off to have their last few major rehearsals, and to have enough time to break down for the next city, where the new run would start.

On the particularly chilly Tuesday morning of this week, Helena rose from another night spent with her parents, had a slow, private cup of tea, and finally put on her jacket to venture outdoors. Much as she didn't want to at that particular moment, she had her last practice with Valentine set for that morning, and for all their disgruntlement, they were both eager to pronounce it officially done.

Her breath steamed as she went out, casting only half an eye on the two stanzas which had appeared on her parents' caravan, put up in the same hand:

_The withered root of knots of hair  
Slitted below and gashed with eyes,  
This oval O cropped out with teeth:  
The sickle motion from the thighs_

_Jackknifes upward at the knees  
Then straightens out from heel to hip  
Pushing the framework of the bed  
And clawing at the pillow slip._

They had yet to figure out where the work was coming from. Helena suspected it would become with time one of the plethora of mysteries surrounding the Campbell Family Circus, and was herself content to live with it, particularly since the rest of the troupe had voted to let her fill in the space around the words with more art, turning the graffiti into something closer to collage.

There weren't many others up this early: the Magician, of course, though that was to be expected, and one of the Fins, and Henry, a roustabout, who as he passed waved pleasantly with his free hand, the other full of bungee.

Valentine was waiting for her in the tent; and while he didn't show himself particularly inclined to speak, he did proffer half a muffin as a peace offering, and warmed up with her in companionable, if not entirely amiable silence.

Their first run of the routine, furthermore, began incredibly well, despite the lingering bad taste of their spat. Valentine remembered a turn he'd been forgetting consistently, and she timed a very tricky hop identically with his for the very first time, regaining her balance in perfect synchronization. It was exciting to feel it unfold as it was meant to, a thought she could tell he shared, their lack of conversation notwithstanding.

They arrived at the drop. Valentine took his trick fall, hooking his legs, and Helena, stepping into his empty place, took a deep breath, gathered the muscles in her legs, and flipped without concern, feeling as ever as she came down his hands catch firm onto hers, and his weight of body as it traveled with hers, absorbing some of the pendulum swing of her redirected momentum.

This was where her memory failed her, as she knew with absolute certainty that he didn't let go, just as certainly as she knew that she didn't, either. One moment she was simply returning to her middle point, and the next she was falling, completely ruining the graceful flow of the run.

"Bugger me senseless," she heard him swear, and agreed, irritated. It had been going unbelievably well, much too well to have to start all over again.

Her body, as it always did when she took a fall, began to scream with instinctual panic, even when her brain knew full well the net was there, that it would catch her. She forced herself with practiced ease to relax, to shift in the air until she was falling flat, evenly distributing her weight. And the net _did_ catch her, as always.

For a moment, at least. Long enough to stop her first fall, but then something somewhere gave, something snapped or simply failed--_Henry, carrying a big pile of bungee under his arm_\--God, why hadn't she noticed whether or not he'd retied one side with ropes, as he always did when he took one of the bungees down for repairs, and wanted to keep the net off the ground, Valentine must have come in right after him and forgotten to check--and she was falling again; not as far, but more than enough to do damage, serious damage, and she had only a single desperately inadequate moment to try and get her feet under her, without luck, before it sunk in that it was all really happening.

The last thing she saw, after Valentine's horrified face, was a hole in the tent top, a spot she recognized as one her father had patched some years ago, through which she could see the sky, a perfect early-morning blue; and framed in the light, the silhouette of a seagull, there for an instant and instantly gone.

Then her arm and leg, followed by her shoulder and head, touched the ground; and with the touch, an explosion of pain so absolute that it couldn't be processed at first as anything but pressure. Then nothing.

~

_III.  
Sometimes I feel like I'm drowning,  
...actually, it's more like most of the time,  
but every now and then when I'm sleeping  
I still have a dream that I'm flying,  
and I wake up crying._

~

When she woke, she was in hospital, and there was a mirror on the ceiling above her.

This seemed incredibly strange, particularly since she had visited her mother so many times during her bad spell (almost three years ago now, now that she thought about it), and couldn't recall ever seeing a mirror in such a stupid place.

Her head ached with a slow, thick pain.

For a moment she closed her eyes, letting the ache wash over and through her, collecting her senses. Waiting for someone to say something.

Where was her family?

Her eyes snapped back open faster than she had intended, letting in an almost painful flood of light--though, when she actually considered it, she had no notion where that was coming from. There was no window in the wall when she looked over, and the mirror was covering the place in the ceiling where she would have expected to see a bulb. She closed her eyes again, taking a fresh moment to collect herself.

Something touched her big toe.

She shouted instantly, falling from the bed in her alarm and striking her bum on--stone. The floor was made of white stone.

"Bloody hell, girl," said a shockingly familiar voice. "That's certainly one way to go about waking up. I tend to prefer a softer landing meself, but whatever melts your cheese."

"Valentine?"

And it was--not hers, not the one she'd become so very intimately familiar with, but the first Valentine, mask and all. He was standing at the foot of the bed, looking oddly ragged in the stringent light. Threadbare.

"The one and only," he agreed, spreading his arms grandly under a broad showman's smile, to all appearances ignorant of his shabby state. "What're you doing here, then? Got bored of your fancy maskless world?"

"Oh, spare me," she laughed, recovering her feet with a faint wince, feeling the same pervasive disinclination as she had on her first trip into this strange blurring of dream and reality to question why she was here. She simply was. "What're _you_ doing here? I thought it was all clear sailing with your tower."

"And so it has been," he replied, moving a bit closer. "We were taking a turn round the Northern border no more than ten minutes ago, I'm absolutely certain, and then--funniest thing, really--the whole bloody world goes and folds itself up. Two dimensions in less than a second, me hand to the sun. Next thing I know I'm in the hall out there, and, well, here you are in here, sleeping like anything."

Looking in the direction he indicated, Helena found that there was indeed a door--and couldn't help but notice at the same time, with the first distant prickling of alarm, that the more she examined it, the more the room began to look like a cell. "Where are we?"

"No idea, really." He peered around briefly, critically. "I did mention the world going in half, right?"

"Right," she said slowly, frowning, and glanced up at the mirror. She could see both of their faces reflected there, and the white bed and white walls, and nothing else.

Memory returned in a rush so sudden that for a moment she actually sagged limply against the footboard, the breath leaving her body in a single great motion.

"Here, now," Valentine said, startled, and scuttled closer. "Alright there?"

"I...hit my head," she whispered, shielding her eyes from the sudden brightness of the walls.

Valentine shrugged, fidgeting as he attempted to decide whether or not patting her shoulder would help. "I do that on occasion. 'Specially round very small doors."

"No, I mean--I really hit it. _Badly_."

Valentine's stare turned pensive. "You aren't going to pass out on me now, are you?"

Helena considered this, straightening slowly. "I don't think so."

A few deep breaths in and out, and finally she could shake her head, looking up at him fully again as the dizziness receded. "No, I'm alright. I mean, I think. I suppose that's what happened to the cities, though--me hitting my head like that scrambled them for a time. I expect they'll come back."

_Provided I wake up again._

Helena desperately wanted to forget that as soon as she'd thought it.

"Well," Valentine said slowly, watching as she recovered. "At least you're more sensibly dressed this time round."

A glance down revealed her still in costume from their practice, the normally vivid green of it oddly leeched of colour. "If you say so. Let's just hope it's not cold once we get outside."

Valentine began to look abruptly uncomfortable. She marveled that she could still tell, even with the mask, though not quite as much as she marveled at the other differences (his speech, to start: she'd forgotten how formal he sounded in comparison).

"Well," he hesitated, tossing a nervous glance toward the door. "It's not so much cold as--uncomfortable."

"Meaning what, precisely?" She could feel her scalp prickling more and more the longer she stayed turned away from the mirror above them, and found herself wanting to get out to the hall as soon as possible.

"Can't explain it, really," he admitted. "Best we just get on our way."

"Fine," she said, and moved around him. The door opened easily, admitting them silently to the hall.

Where Helena had to stop almost immediately, gaping, as she found all the walls outside--every single one, even the ceiling--to be composed of mirrors; not single long pieces, but many five-foot lengths stuck together, creating an infinitely repeating, endlessly dizzying pattern of her own pale face, soon joined by Valentine.

"See?" he said, watching her. "Unexplainable, and yet...uncomfortable."

"Yes," she breathed, trying to keep from being overwhelmed by it all. "Yes, I believe I do see." And she began to understand that he hadn't been joking about his trepidation, his unspoken hinting that she might be here for some time--though at the same time she could feel that this was going be in many ways a much shorter foray than her last, given how high the tension had already climbed, and how--_fragmented_ everything felt, as though something larger had been in the works, only to be abruptly, unpleasantly interrupted.

"What do we do now?" she wondered, casting her eyes up and down the hall.

"Begin walking, I expect," Valentine replied lightly, and glanced over his shoulder. "Haven't got much choice now, anyway. Door's gone."

Startled, Helena turned toward the spot where the door had just been, and found it in fact vanished, as though it had never existed.

"Bugger," she muttered, trying to quell a sudden feeling of panic. "How did you get in to start?"

"It was already open."

"Damn." Helena stamped down on a frustrated sigh, taking one final look around. Every mirrored image of her head turned with her, a flurry of dark hair against silvery nothingness. "I suppose we'd better hope to find another, then."

~

The shocking thing was that they _did_, and in remarkably good time--which was saying something, given how every second spent walking among all those mirrors felt somehow infinite, and began after only a few minutes to actually sicken her. She'd never grown so tired of looking at herself so fast.

She supposed about twenty minutes passed between their leaving the first room and reaching the second, though her sense of time was so rattled that she certainly wouldn't have bet on it. Worse still than her queasiness at the finding, however, was the way the door had been opened toward them, hiding the room's contents from sight. She had been paranoid since waking up, but that made her downright itchy.

"You look," she told Valentine after a moment's pause, only to follow close behind him despite her words, afraid that if he strayed too far away she would lose him.

He didn't look very happy to follow that particular command, but walked forward despite this, at first only peeking around the mirror's edge with one eye of his mask, then stepping all the way around, disappearing quite suddenly, leaving her alone with her image.

"What's in there?" she called anxiously, resisting the urge to begin scratching at her elbows.

"Stars," came his wondering response, slightly muffled by the mirror door.

Perplexed, she forced herself to step around after him, looking in under one of his lifted arms instead of making him move.

The room was full to the brim with absolute blackness, dark as the night sky, the rich, relieving solidness of it interrupted by a blessedly asymmetrical scattering of stars. She felt in that instant that she could have stood there, just looking out over it, for the rest of her life, picking out patterns at her leisure and never having to turn back to the mirrors again.

"Look," said Valentine, interrupting her reverie, and indicated a particular constellation. "Orion. Fancy that, eh? Tis the only group I know."

"Orion," she repeated, wondering why that sounded so familiar. After a moment without success, however, she turned her contemplation toward a different intuition, pursuing some scrap of knowledge tumbling around her head.

Finally it came to her from the jumbled noise of her thoughts, not so much wisdom as a bit of sudden, pertinent recollection: _Keep an eye on the sky, Helena._

Her mouth dropped open, the speaker of the phrase at last painfully clear to her. She turned to Valentine, staring openly. "That was you?"

"Pardon?" he said, reeling back a bit, apparently dismayed by her changing expression.

"That was _you_," she repeated, "_you_ were the one telling me to look to the sky all the time."

"Ah." Now he merely looked embarrassed, coughing lightly into one hand.

"Why?"

"Well." He began to rock on his heels slowly, not looking at her. "Not for any _particular_ reason--I didn't know I was speaking to _you_, really--but if I had to guess at the workings of my own fantastically complex mind, I would submit that I might have maybe been encouraging you to keep an eye out for me. Should you ever come back."

"Oh," she said, and smiled.

And got it.

"That's it," she whispered, grabbing hold of his arm in the light of her epiphany. "I've no clue what this stupid room's supposed to be for, but what you've been saying--that's where we need to go. Up. That's it."

"How do you figure that?"

But Helena had already begun dragging him away from the star room, purpose at last clear. "We need to find some stairs or something. Look sharp, love."

~

"_Love_," he repeated, perhaps an hour later, as their search for stairs began to seem more than just a little ridiculous. The bloody hall was _endless_, endless and sickening, and Helena never, ever wanted to see her face again.

"What?" she demanded, only half-listening.

"Love," he said again, peering down at her quizzically. He too had begun to look a little peaked, but as Helena was slowly noticing, even he wasn't quite right, either her perception of him being thrown off from her injury, or his ability to stare at his face for hours and hours simply being stronger than hers. "You called me love."

"Did I?" she wondered, too tired to even bother flushing at her slip.

"You did."

"Well, pretend I didn't."

A moment of silence. Then, "I suppose you--found the other me, then?"

Helena stopped walking, blinking at him, unwilling to believe that she'd imagined the hopeful note in his tone. "Yes," she admitted, watching him closely. "He's not exactly the same, of course, but yes."

"Oh," he said, and worked up the nerve to tender, weakly, "I didn't _actually_ become a waiter, did I?"

A smile stole across her features, the first in some time. "No. We work together now."

"Oh," he said again, considerably more relieved this time, before attempting to hide it with an elaborate cough. "Well, I expect I'm content enough, then."

"Are you?" she wondered faintly, rubbing her hands over face. "It's hard to tell these days. We've been arguing rather a lot."

"Why?"

Helena tried to think of a way to explain it to him, only to find suddenly that she couldn't, none of her reasons sounding at all adequate. She wondered what Valentine would do if she really died from her fall. "I don't know. We've just been--scared for one another, I guess.

"Sounds reasonable," he reflected, only to add with remarkable prescience, "so long's as it's not been me scared for you, and you scared for yourself, or the other way round. _That_ would certainly make things messy. It's all about compromise and flexibility and what have you. Or so I've heard."

Pulling a face, Helena turned to demand what exactly he knew about compromise, and caught sight of a difference in one of the mirrors over his shoulder; a faint etching, painfully easy to miss.

"Hang on," she breathed, dodging around him to read it. "What's this?"

Valentine looked as well, and read after a moment:

_"Two sisters are we, one dark and one fair,  
In two towers dwelling, we make quite the pair.  
One from the land and one from the sea--  
Tell us truly, who are we?"_

"Damn!" Helena hissed, disappointed. "I've heard that already in those rubbish dreams, and--"

\--and from her father.

She remembered now, clearly; six years old, sitting at the caravan table, and him marching the glass cellars toward her while she giggled, reciting with tremendous gravity the same verse, and as he came to the third line, tapping a little shower onto her head, one each of--

"Salt and pepper," she marveled. "What nonsense."

But that was the point, wasn't it?

All of this was nonsense, all of it scrambled up hopelessly out of shape. Her last visit had had such purpose, such structure, for all its crowded expression. This time there wasn't anything but confusion.

"Valentine," she sighed, "I've been going about this all the wrong way. I--"

Valentine, however, was gone.

~

She hadn't seen him vanish. One instant he'd simply been there, and the next gone. She called out for him, but received nothing by way of response, even an echo of her own voice. All there was left, in sight and in mind, was her face.

That and the mirrors.

She kicked the one with the verse written on before she'd stopped to consider what she was doing, teeth gritted with frustration and hurt. Hair cracks radiated out from the blow. She kicked with her heel next, once, twice, and finally watched in some satisfaction as it broke to pieces, the pieces dropping with a quiet sound of rain.

Behind the mirror was a staircase.

"Well, then," she said, and stepping over the shards, began walking.

~

She found exactly what she had been expecting at the top of the flight, which only made sense, given that it was not only her dream, but her one option: an enormous full-length mirror in the centre of an empty room, the walls and floors utterly blank.

For all that she had known it would be there, she was still reluctant to draw closer, apprehensive. It had an uncanny quality that made her scalp prickle, a prickling that spread to gooseflesh across her whole body when she at last came around to the reflective side, and caught sight of herself in the glass.

It was her; the voice and presence, the once-princess; though not so much a princess now, she suspected, as the last remnant.

Or perhaps the electricity behind all the action.

"It's just been me," Helena whispered, staring. The _hers_ eyes were flat, infinite black, familiar, a gaze she at last realized reminded her of Valencia; or rather that this was what Valencia had reminded her of all along. She felt abruptly sick to her stomach, wondering how many other things she'd done in the last few months had been influenced by this. "All this time, it really was just me borrowing trouble."

Her reflection smiled, blinking her sleek black eyes prettily. "Not quite," she said, drawing nearer to the glass. Helena found herself likewise moving closer. "It's been a bit of both, I think. You and me together."

"Why?" Helena whispered, coming up against the glass, face to face, mouth to mouth. It was shockingly cold.

"Why ask?" she countered, a hand on her shoulder, fingers caressing. "You were the one who wanted to be left alone. Isn't that what this whole thing's been about?"

"No," Helena protested, but knew as she said it that that wasn't wholly true. "Not like this."

"It's the only way it'll work, sweeting."

"It _was_ you in those dreams, then." Helena had of course already recognized her voice, but that sinuous, pervasive _sweeting_ was the final piece in the puzzle. "That was you talking to me, and you who--in the mirrors, why did you...?"

She sounded amused when she responded: "Why not? It's me you wanted to take care of you. You knew it would all go south with him sooner or later."

"But who _are_ you?" Helena wondered desperately. "I mean--are you really the same one I knew before? The princess?"

"Antonymic," came the soft response, the words running down Helena's body like water, diffusing through her pores. "Diametric. Antithetic. You remember me, me."

"But you _aren't_ me. Not really, not exactly."

"Close enough."

"Salt and pepper," Helena whispered, eyes stinging. "Stuff and nonsense."

"Not nonsense," said her reflection soothingly. "After all, I'm going to help you, aren't I? I'll be the one taking care of you. You don't even have to wake up if you don't want. You can stay with me forever, and you _know_ I'll never go."

There was something else Helena knew, too, fighting for dominance. It was hard to think of it past her voice, though. She tried anyway, frowning in concentration.

"You see all this blank? You could have another world here if you liked, and we'd be in it together forever, free from the rest of it. No need to pass some silly standard. Complete control."

She almost had it, she was _certain_\--

"You know you never trusted him, anyway. Not _really_."

"I did."

There it was.

"I _did_," she repeated, louder, into her other's surprised silence. "I do. You're the one I didn't trust."

"Nonsense--"

"Not nonsense," Helena said, parroting back her own words.

And it all then began falling fully into place, opening up before her mind like a day lily, like her coat every time Valentine held it up for her-- "You--how could I be so _stupid_ again? All this time I thought I was being _sensible_, but really you just wanted to stop me like I stopped you, you wanted me to know how you felt, I'll bet you even made Valentine disappear, and he didn't do anything at all but get stuck in between--"

Her voice was a shriek interrupting, agonized and furious: "_It wasn't **fair**! It **wasn't**, it wasn't, you got exactly what you wanted and all I got was more of the same. Why shouldn't I get to have you now? All I ever wanted was you_\--"

"I want to wake up now," Helena whispered, closing her eyes, and felt the glass cracking around her. She hadn't realized how far she'd sunk in, staring at herself.

"_No, please, please stay_\--"

"Wake up now."

It began to fall silently away from the curves of her body, leaving her to drop through blackness. Or perhaps she was really rising, moving toward solidity, toward the sky again. She supposed it didn't particularly matter. She'd had her fill of being alone.

_Wake up now._

~

The first thing to filter through was the gentle electric whir of machinery, and beyond and under this, a soft rain. Helena opened her eyes.

She was in a hospital bed beside a large window, the sky outside iron grey, gloaming. Valentine's tousled head was resting beside hers on the mattress, his eyes closed and ringed with red, asleep. The overhead light had been dimmed for the evening, soft yellow as opposed to blinding white, turning his normally grey-blond hair a richer gold tone.

It was briefly jarring to see his face instead of the mask. Helena reached out slowly to touch his chin, which was rough with shadow, but still more or less clean-shaven. "Valentine."

He woke quickly, eyes flickering, then lifting to take in her face, her own open eyes.

"Mary," he whispered, and abruptly grabbed onto her reaching hand, engulfing it in his large one. "On--on the off-chance that I'm not dreamin' again, _I adore you_. I love you more than anythin' I've ever come across in me whole banjaxed life, and I shall do whatever you ask for the rest of what remains of it, whatever you want, just--don't be goin' to sleep again."

Helena stared at him in wordless fascination for several long seconds. Then she said, "I think we should get married."

His eyebrows almost--but not quite--made it clear to his hairline before they stopped. "_What?_"

"Well, not _now_, obviously," she clarified, rolling her eyes, which was actually amazingly difficult to do, what with the tremendous headache she was just becoming aware of. There was a pulse monitor on the pointer of her other hand, damp with sweat. "Just, you know. Someday. Will they let you carry me back to the camper, d'you think?"

Valentine had begun to grin, eyes shining wetly in the dim light. "I shall," he declared, "even if the clatty bastards won't."

And he leaned forward to press a kiss to her forehead, which for all his tender care was still quite painful, and which she endured in contented silence.

She wondered when she'd be well enough to fly again.

~

_I am grey, still on the page, oh colour me in.  
Just an outline, sketchy but fine, oh colour me in.  
If green is chasing the hills over miles, if blue is pursuing the sky,  
If the red of your heart doesn't mind where to begin to colour me in...  
Something new and nothing to do, I'm just the idea.  
I must be real 'cause somehow I feel that I'm just the idea.  
Let's share the blue of the towering sky, the green of the hills that run by;  
Leave the red of your heart to decide if you cannot choose which colour to use.  
I'll always wait, it's never too late to colour me in, to colour me in...  
Today or next year, I'll always be near  
If you want to colour me in._

**end**

**Author's Note:**

> Songs and poems in order of appearance:  
> 1\. Sweeney Erect, T. S. Eliot (poem)  
> 2\. This is a Low, Blur (song)  
> 3\. Sweeney Among the Nightingales, T. S. Eliot (poem)  
> 4\. Sweeney Erect (again). T. S. Eliot (poem)  
> 5\. Dream About Flying, Alexi Murdoch (song)  
> 6\. Colour Me In, Broadcast (song)


End file.
